Industries

Three pence of profit on a pint, and everyone wants a share

Wet-led pubs made around 3p profit for every pound spent on a pint in 2026, down from 5p the year before. Full service restaurants run at 3 to 6 per cent net. At those margins a supplier price rise that goes unnoticed for six weeks is not an annoyance, it is the year.

Restaurants, takeaways, pubs and cafes

What goes wrong

Delivery commission is invisible in the accounts

Platforms take 25 to 35 per cent, so a £12 dish returns £8.40. It does not show in cost of sales, so gross profit looks fine while net quietly disappears. Delivery menus need 8 to 12 points more margin to break even and most operators price them identically.

Costing by hand cannot keep up

Manual dish costing runs around 28 minutes per menu item and prices move weekly. A dish costed at 30 per cent food cost in January can be running at 36 by March with nobody aware. The gap between theoretical and actual should stay under two points.

You get benchmarked whether you like it or not

HMRC publishes expected profit figures for restaurants and compares filed returns against them automatically. A business can be entirely straight and still sit below the range because of delivery mix, discounting and waste. The difficulty is evidencing that after the fact.

A tie removes the obvious lever

Tied tenants buy at pubco prices, which costs 8 to 12 points of gross profit against free of tie. Every piece of advice about switching suppliers and negotiating harder is useless to roughly ten thousand tenants who have no supplier to switch.

Free tools

Start with something free

No signup and no email wall. Nothing you enter is sent anywhere.

Restaurant benchmark check →

Where you sit against the published profit benchmarks, how much of any gap delivery, discounting and waste account for, and what records would evidence it.

Delivery margin calculator →

Which dishes lose money once the platform takes its cut, what you would need to charge to break even, and what to charge to match dine-in.

GP calculator with wastage →

Gross profit across the whole range at once, with wastage applied by product type and VAT handled the right way round.

Labour by session →

Which trading sessions contribute and which merely cover themselves, using what an hour actually costs rather than the rate.

Reporting cost calculator →

What the manual side of running the numbers actually costs, by role, at true employment cost.

Data health check →

Check a supplier or customer list before it goes into anything. Runs in your browser, nothing uploaded.

ProductAvailable now

Margin Manager

  • Invoice scanning: photograph a delivery note and the prices update
  • Recipe costing that updates every dish when an ingredient price moves
  • Delivery margin by dish, so you can see which ones lose money on platform
  • Stocktake variance tracked over time rather than counted and forgotten
  • Menu engineering, sorting dishes into what earns and what does not
  • A dated waste, comp and discount log that doubles as evidence
  • Platform income reconciled against what the platforms report to HMRC
See Margin ManagerFrom £49 a month, 14 days free, no card needed
Bespoke work

Or something built around your business

Products solve the problem every hospitality business has. When the problem is yours specifically, that is a build.

Excel automationThe costing spreadsheet one person maintains, turned into something the business owns.Power BIMargin, labour and covers across several sites on one dashboard.Custom business toolsRota, stock or costing systems built around how your kitchen actually runs.
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